


Picture Paragraphs

by cAtEr_PiLlAr



Category: 1984 - George Orwell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:07:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22296793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cAtEr_PiLlAr/pseuds/cAtEr_PiLlAr
Summary: A short one.
Kudos: 2





	Picture Paragraphs

The levels were normal. The food rations were steady, the work hours were just as he remembered it. The people were not revolting, the proletariat were just as sequestrated from him and the Party as before. The Party was still the greatest exponent of influence in the state. And the people were happy.

His return from the cool April forests was welcomed with a celebration from the people in Victory Square. The throbbing crowds of joyful and grateful people who came to see a Party member come out of a 8 month imprisonment from the warring state of the enemies. This was the first time a Party member was imprisoned, and also the first time that a Party member was released from prison. The crowd of loyal working folk never stopped cheering. They were constantly blessing him in the name of Soc and the state. The crowd rang a deafening roar when the released man walked on stage in Victory Square.

Posters started appearing since the news of his release. Everywhere people looked, they saw his face and the metaphor of him. People propagandized him as a face of Soc and the embodiment of Party. His father-like face was drawn as a supreme man who demanded fealty attention from fellow Party members and the proletarians. He was hailed as a war hero in the name of sovereignty made by the Party.

When the man was in front of crowd couldn’t help but smile. Ronald Chamberlain was the man worth of celebration. After all he made his people so happy and they were cheering, screaming, yelling, spitting with joy, stomping, clapping, whistling, waving their arms, and crying because of him. He might write a book about it, he thought, because the people surely would want to know what happened with the enemy.

He made a brief appearance at the ceremony, which would disband in a number of hours but would really last another day or two. The people had no sense of time, the Party made life a way to where the people don’t need to keep track of time. And if someone tried to pin down the date of a recollected memory, there was not doubt that they could be off by a number of years. So Ronald wasn’t going to pin this date down in his memory anyway.

He settled down back in his office at the Ministry of Information, where elite Party members got him settled in and told him what they wanted him to do differently. He agreed to all their requests.

Ronald went to a Party sponsored coffee shop near the Proletariat Strip One, a ghetto where the working-class Proles lived and worked. He was greeted by a nonchalant waiter who served him a glass of gin flavored with clover. Ronald was not in the mood for anything different, partly because that was the only drink they served, and in part of the hard day at the minifo (short for Ministry of Information). His visit to the cafe brought pedestrians over to him to bid him hello and praise for his existence.

One curious senile man walked over and thanked him for making today’s scene a little more interesting. Ronald thanked him for his politeness and calm composure, there were many people more fervent in seeing him. The old man struck up conversation of the ambush.

“So what did those bloody men do to you when they had gotten you?” He said in a thick accent slugged with gin.

“Well the Party didn’t want me disclosing any valuable information until they analyzed my story enough.” Ronald said casually. He had denied questions from his people for over a week now.

“What? What would a bloody bastard like me want to do ‘information’ like that? Would I tell the whole world that they did this or they did that to you? Everyone is glad that your alive and well. Looks like they fed you real well by the looks of it.”

They did.

The man walked away, forgetting about his question, laughing, “Must had been tortuous still…”

No, Ronald thought, it wasn’t tortuous. It was like a nursery rhyme that had surfaced from the decades of memory. But the rhyme was incomplete, and the feeling of trying to figure out that rhyme is what Ronald concluded his experience was like.

The smell of the clover-flavored gin clouded the room after the old man walked out with his glass still in his hand. Ronald looked to see if any of the waiters noticed, but they were busy waiting people, tending the drunken, or captivated by the screen of the telly. The telly is the equivalent to an EastAsian video set. The picture and sound come out of the screen, giving messages to the people. The last time Ronald checked the number of tellies, there were about 1.4 billion tellies in the state. All of them on the same channel, giving the same messages and controlled by the same Party members since the 1950’s. It was truly a sight to see.

Ronald’s recollection of the imprisonment was very hazy, partly because most of it came out of his and the Party’s imagination. He was working with inner-Party members to write a detailed account of his time done in an Pacifico relocation camp. It took place in the Pacifico area of Oceania on the ancient island of New Zealand. Where he and 3 other prisoners were released from the camp on good behavior and whisked by boat to Fortified 10, the area of the state which he now resides. The 3 other prisoners were brutally murdered on the boat for “unnecessary use of tobacco”, this happened because their cigarette ashed were blowing away in the wind and making the chamber where they slept dirty and smelling of smoke. Ronald was safe because he offered a cigarette to one of the guards before the murder. To prevent the Pacifico people from heading towards Party waters, they dumped Ronald overboard with a old boat and an orange. Ronald rowed 14 miles to a deserted town with the name of Brighton. From there he met villagers and traveled to the capital where he was named a hero.

The volume ended up to be more than three hundred pages. And it serves as a standard book in high-school classes as a patriotic book that should inspire other children to have the same patriotism. And the Party will carefully monitor the curriculum for these advanced rhetoric classes for any misguidance from Party doctrine. The book also should promote crime stop also.

Ronald was glad to be a part of the Party’s decennial exercise over the outer-Party and the proletariat.

* * *

Ronald knew he was the scapegoat. The Party put the people’s hatred of the Pacifico through him to make him a hero. This was done so the people don’t get too pent up with aggression and do something to make the community suffer. But even then, there was no law in Fortified 10, so anything was technically legal. But the Party had the power to kidnap any wrong-doers and erase their existence among society. The people felt so much loyalty to the Party’s skewed doctrines and god-like embrace that they do anything told of them. Even if it is forgetting someone that was unique. It wasn’t even forgetting, Ronald concluded, it was just simply not every seeing this person, hearing of them, or mentioning of them or hinting at them. Because doing that brings danger to yourself.

Ronald also knew that the Party could instantly label him as a spy for the Pacifico, or any country for that matter. And everything that they said before, anything that he had done, would immediate reverse and the people would despise him until the Party said otherwise. But keeping him in limbo was part of the exercise.

Ronald had no other choice but to love the Party, it wasn’t enough to obey, it wasn’t enough to say it, he had to believe it. And he never thought differently. He knew the Party was going to kill him off by labeling him as a terrorist. But it was all part of the plan to keep peace for the greater good. And the greater good was to keep the Party in control.


End file.
